Bug or Design limitation??

[Jack Vogel]

Our test group just ran into something I hadnt noticed before.
Take a system and put in two different multiport NIC boards,
one older (PCI-X) and one new PCI-E board.

Load a driver that only recognizes the first board. It will show
em0, em1, em2, em3, the new ports will be none's.

Unload that driver and then load a newer one that recognizes
both boards. What you'd expect to see is em0....em7. But
what you actually see is two sets of em0 - em3!

Our test lead noticed this because it broke some scripts of
his. Now, 'ifconfig' gets it right and still presents you with 0-7.

If you load the newer driver first then of course all is correct.

So, the question is, is this a bug? Clearly the enumerated
data from the older driver loaded is staying around. I do
not know how this kernel data is handled, so could/should
it be removed and isnt or what?

Cheers,

Jack